How to Optimize Your Blog for SEO

The main purpose of writing a high quality blog post is to share your knowledge and stick out as an expert in your niche. To accomplish this goal, you need to make sure people find your post. The easiest way to ensure this happens is by driving traffic to the post to attract a high quantity of readers.

Since organic traffic can be the most economical type of traffic, it’s essential to strategize the best ways of attracting it. Having your post ranked highly on the SERPs (search engine result pages) is pivotal to getting in front of the most amounts of people. Very few people go beyond the first page of Google’s search results.

If you’re wondering how to optimize your blog for SEO and have your posts rank higher on the SERPs, there are tactics that can be implemented to help improve your posts’ rank on search engines like Google.

Link your posts internally

To boost newly created posts, link them from older posts, which are already indexed. This helps get the new post indexed fast. In addition to getting the get post indexed fast, the links from older posts will act as backlinks thus pushing it higher in the SERPs.

To help Google know what the post is about, use keyword rich anchor text when linking to the post. Also, make sure to link from related posts only.

For example, Search Engine Land uses the phrase “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)” in a post about local businesses and search engines to link to their SEO guide.

Share the post on social media

It is 2014 and search engines are giving attention to social signals more than ever before. Google, Bing, and other search engines are actively using social signals as a ranking factor. To boost your posts, share them with your circles and social media audience, and hopefully your followers will share them with their own.

Did you know that using Google+ to share your blog posts can really boost your online marketing? Google+ deserves a lot of attention in regard to search since Google owns Google+. This means that Google has easy and unrestricted access to Google+ data and, obviously, gives partiality to this network for search results.

For instance, a search for ‘Social Media’ on Google shows a Google+ post — which is 3 hours old — on search results.

Create external links to your posts

First things first: make sure your content is linkworthy – content that sites will want to link to.

After you have crafted a high-quality post, reach out to bloggers and webmasters in your niche (who have content similar to yours) and see if they would be open to linking to your post. The post should provide value to their users.

External links will not only drive referral traffic to your post but also improve the post’s Google ranking.

Optimize your images

To make sure the spiders understand the images on your posts, optimize them with keyword rich names, titles, alt tags, and captions.

Search engine optimized images will not only boost your post in the SERPs but will also increase your traffic from people doing image searches.

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This post was contributed by Sorcha Mullis, an Online Marketing Specialist with White Chalk Road, a leading SEO and online marketing firm in Perth, Western Australia. White Chalk Road provides SEO, SEM, PPC and online reputation management services to clients based in Perth and wider Australia. Connect with Sorcha on Google+.